Bush can't give frank answers mother deserves

Camped out in Crawford, Texas, with several other mothers who lost sons in Iraq, Ms. Sheehan wants to meet President Bush. She says: "Our sons made the ultimate sacrifice, and we want answers."

I understand why Mr. Bush doesn't want to meet Ms. Sheehan. She wants him to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq. But he can't pull the troops out. He can't even make the substantial reductions that some of his top brass are predicting for early next year. If he does, he risks disaster for Iraqis while boosting the cause of jihadi terrorists.

And Mr. Bush can't afford to tell the mothers why he's caught in this trap.

If Mr. Bush met Ms. Sheehan, platitudes would not suffice. She would want to know why 140,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines are stuck in Iraq more than two years after the fall of Baghdad. She would demand answers that go beyond "Freedom is on the march."

Mr. Bush is not willing to give those frank answers. If he were, here's what he would have to say :

"Mrs. Sheehan, our troops are mired in Iraq because of errors made by my team. The Pentagon made no plans for the postwar. We sent too few troops to secure Iraq after Saddam Hussein fell, despite prewar warnings by top U.S. generals. This created a power vacuum, into which rushed former Baathists who want to restore the old order, along with Iraqi criminals and Arab jihadis.

"I admit we failed to recognize the danger of this power vacuum. We disbanded Iraq's army, rather than let Iraqis revamp it. This required us to build new Iraqi security forces from scratch, a mammoth task that only got going in June 2004. Those new Iraqi forces are far, far from ready to fight alone.

"The real truth is we were wrong to think we could build a new Iraqi army like kids build with Legos. Building an army takes more than sending equipment and trainers. We forgot that we were dealing with human beings in a country very different from ours.

"One of our fine retired U.S. generals, Barry McCaffrey, who visited Iraq in May, summed it up just right: `Here's the real shortcoming of the Iraqi forces: Do they collectively believe it's worth fighting and dying for Iraq?' Iraq is so split by religious and ethnic conflicts that many Iraqi soldiers don't know what they're fighting for.

"So we are caught in an awful bind, Ms. Sheehan. Our military has concluded we can't defeat this insurgency by force. We don't have the manpower or the intelligence resources. We've badly over-stretched our National Guard, along with our Army and Marines.

"But if we leave now, Iraq will disintegrate, maybe into full-scale civil war. The Kurds will take the north. The Shiite majority, who were our tacit allies, will take the south and most of the oil and ally with Iran. Worst of all, the Sunni chunk of the country will become a nightmare zone, where Arab terrorists train for attacks against our Arab allies, their oil wells and Israel.

"The Iraqi terrorist threat that didn't exist before we invaded will truly haunt the region. We will have created a monster.

"So when can our troops come home, you ask?

"It's up to the Iraqis.

"Yes, I know this is expecting a lot. Yes, I know Iraq is on the brink of civil war. I agree I overplayed the chance of democracy in a country with no experience of political give-and-take.

"We're damned if we leave, and we may be damned if we stay, but we have to stick it out in force until next summer. By then, we'll know if the Iraqis can get their act together. If not, we'll be in big, big trouble.

"Who's to blame, you ask? Why haven't I fired Don Rumsfeld? Why haven't Paul Wolfowitz or Douglas Feith taken any heat for their gross mismanagement of the postwar?

"There's a limit to frankness, Ms. Sheehan. I sympathize with your loss, but I really have to get back to my vacation ..."

Trudy Rubin is a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her column appears Tuesdays and Fridays in The Sun.